Urban Society

At the beginning of the twentieth century, only 10.5 percent of the
national population lived in localities with more than 15,000 residents.
A slow but steady increase of such urban communities occurred over the
next four decades, accounting for 20 percent of the country's total
population in 1940. They climbed rapidly to 27.9 percent in 1950, 36.5
percent in 1960, 44.7 percent in 1970, 51.8 percent in 1980, and 57.4
percent in 1990. An estimated 71 percent of all Mexicans lived in
communities of at least 2,500 residents in 1990.

Three cities--Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey--dominated the
urban landscape in the mid-1990s. Their metropolitan areas accounted for
about one-fourth of the nation's population and more than 40 percent of
the total urban population. Nonetheless, the highest growth rates
between 1970 and 1990 occurred in cities containing populations ranging
from 100,000 to 1 million. Roughly 23 percent of the nation resided in
Mexico's fifty-six mid-level cities in 1990.

With 15 million residents reported in the 1990 census, the Mexico
City metropolitan area alone contained 18.5 percent of the total
national population. However, the metropolitan area expanded only 5.8
percent from 1980 to 1990, far below the 2.3 percent per annum national
population growth rate over the same period. The population of Mexico
City itself declined from 9.2 million in 1980 to 8.2 million in 1990, a
10.9 percent reduction. This decline probably reflected both
dislocations experienced by low-income, center-city residents following
the 1985 earthquake and contracting employment opportunities during the
economic crisis of the 1980s. However, one analyst, Alfonso X. Iracheta
Cenecorta, contends that Mexico City should be viewed not as a single
metropolitan area but rather as an emerging megalopolis also
incorporating the cities and surrounding environs of Puebla, Toluca, and
Cuernavaca. Seen from this perspective, the region continued to grow
during the 1980s, and included slightly more than 17 million people in
1990.

To relieve the strains of rapid growth on Mexico's largest cities,
the Salinas administration encouraged businesses and government agencies
to move their operations from the major metropolitan areas to mid-level
cities. During the 1980s, mid-level cities experienced the nation's
highest growth rates. Several cities in northern Mexico, especially
along the border with the United States, were particularly dynamic
during this period. They included Torreón, Tijuana, Mexicali,
Matamoros, and Ciudad Juárez. Other rapidly expanding cities included
Cuernavaca and Jalapa near the capital, and Tampico and Coatzacoalcos on
the Gulf of Mexico coast.

The dramatic growth of cities over the past forty years has seriously
taxed the nation's ability to build urban infrastructure, especially
housing. Adequate and affordable housing emerged as a paramount concern
of low-income residents after 1940. Prior to that time, most urban poor
lived in center-city rental units. Real estate investors frequently
converted deteriorating colonial structures into vecindades
(sing., vecindad ). A vecindad typically consists of a
large number of rented rooms constructed around an interior open area.
Residents share kitchen and bathroom facilities, often of marginal
quality. Following institution of rent control by the government during
World War II, investors often abandoned the vecindad market,
depleting an already poor housing stock.

Government efforts to address the urban housing shortfall after World
War II generally proved inadequate. During the 1950s and 1960s, the
government financed some housing units in major metropolitan areas, the
largest of which--the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex in northern
Mexico City--contained nearly 12,000 units.

However, public employees were the principal beneficiaries of
government housing programs. During the administration of Luis Echeverría
Álvarez (1970-76), the government took a more active role in fostering
formal- and informal-sector housing. Three funds were established in
1972: the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (Instituto
del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores--Infonavit); the
Housing Fund of the Institute of Social Security and Services for State
Workers (Fondo para la Vivienda del Instituto de Servicios y Seguridad
Social de los Trabajadores del Estado--Fovissste); and the National
Institute for Community Development (Instituto Nacional para el
Desarrollo de la Comunidad--Indeco). These funds were designed to meet
the needs of private-sector formal workers, state employees, and
informal-sector workers, respectively. Of the three funds, Infonavit was
the most extensive, with nearly 900,000 units financed over a
twenty-year period. Still, demand far exceeded supply and a lottery
system was used to determine occupancy. In addition, most workers could
not afford the monthly payments required.

For the majority of the urban lower class, so-called self-help
housing has emerged as the only viable option. A self-help housing
community typically begins with the purchase by investors of large
tracts of contiguous land on the periphery of urban areas. In some
cases, these transactions involve illegal purchases of ejido properties
of dubious agricultural worth. Whether ejido or not, however,
the tracts usually consist of marginal lands ill-suited for middle- and
upper-class residential developments or for industrial purposes.
Investors subdivide the land into numerous lots and sell them to
low-income families, who then build modest brick structures, often with
only single large rooms. Ostensibly, investors cannot sell lots until
they have installed water and sewer lines, paved streets, and completed
other basic infrastructure. Frequently, however, investors do little
more than mark the lots for sale. Because a large land tract may contain
thousands of potential lots, investors often realize enormous profits.

Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico's quintessential self-help housing community,
burst onto the national scene during the 1960s. During the late 1950s, a
group of investors purchased more than sixty square kilometers of land
east of Mexico City in an area in the state of México just outside the
Federal District. The land in question, a dried lakebed, flooded during
the rainy season and was prone to dust storms during the dry season.
Nonetheless, investors created 160,000 low-income housing lots. By 1970
Nezahualcóyotl contained nearly 700,000 residents, but there were few
public services.

Local governments have varied widely in the degree of support
extended to self-help housing developments. Although the Federal
District blocked most self-help housing after the early 1950s, the
neighboring state of México actively encouraged the development of
communities such as Nezahualcóyotl, in effect serving as a safety valve
for Mexico City. Likewise, Guadalajara generally has endorsed such
development as an appropriate response to the housing needs of the urban
poor. By contrast, Monterrey and a number of other cities in northern
Mexico have opposed self-help communities, a decision that has sparked
frequent squatter invasions of ejido land. Local authorities
sometimes have used force to dislodge the invaders, but often have
tacitly allowed the new communities to remain.

Despite obvious problems, self-help housing has addressed numerous
important and cross-cutting social issues. These communities
substantially increase the housing stock available to low-income urban
residents. As sociologists Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward have observed,
without self-help construction, the government either would have to
expend many more resources on housing projects or raise wages to enable
the poor to compete in the formal housing market. By forcing people to
build their own homes, the government has been able to preserve funds to
underwrite industrial development. Self-help housing also allows
lower-income residents to become owners rather than renters. And as
self-help communities mature and residents add to initial structures,
renters (typically poorer, younger, and more recently arrived in the
city than owners) have housing options other than vecindades .

Even including self-help construction, however, Mexico faced a severe
housing crisis in the mid-1990s. The Zedillo administration reported in
1995 that more than 25 percent of the 17.8 million houses needed to be
repaired or replaced. Because two-thirds of the population are under
thirty years of age, analysts project sharp increases in demand for new
housing over the next two decades.